[ { "id": 204398, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1962", "page_number": 30, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "NESTORIAN CROSSES\n\n21\n\nNestorian community in his letters, and their king George, whom he converted from Nestorianism to the Catholic faith.\n\nThe scattered references to the Nestorians in the accounts of the friars are confirmed by Marco Polo (1271-1295) who with his father and uncle can represent for us the second group of travelling merchants. Everywhere through Central Asia and China Marco found Nestorian Christians, usually in the service of the Court, and probably more often than not of Syrian, Persian or Turkish race, employed as administrative officials by the alien government on account of their high standard of literacy.\n\nMarco Polo also confirms the existence of a Nestorian Christian tribe with their Christian king George (whom he confuses with Prester John as Odoric also does) at the Yellow River bend. It seems likely that the name 'Tenduc' which he gives to the region is the early pronunciation of T'ien-tê which was an old name of the present city of Kuei-hua{ in that region, near which is the important market town of Pao-t'ou in which Mr. P. M. Scott found the first fourteen crosses of our paper. Similarly the Tozan of Odoric may be identified with Tung-sheng, an early name for the same region. The Christian Mongol tribe situated by the Ordos bend of the Yellow River is known from various sources to have been the Onguts (Wang-ku people), to which Marco Polo refers, though confusedly, in calling their king Ung-Khan.\n\nThese facts are confirmed in a remarkable way by a Syriac document describing a pilgrimage of two Eastern Nestorian monks—one an Ongut, the other of Uigur stock—from their monastery near Peking to the seat of the Nestorian Patriarch in Mesopotamia in A.D. 1278. In the course of their journey they visited the Christian Ongut tribe by the Yellow River bend, and from them received a touching farewell.19\n\nIV. NESTORIAN RELICS IN CHINA AND MONGOLIA\n\nWith the expulsion of the Mongols from China at the fall of the Yuan dynasty in A.D. 1368, the Christianity both Nestorian and Franciscan that had been associated with their regime disappeared.\n\n17 Letters of Montecorvino, see Yule, op. cit., and Moule, op. cit., pp. 171 ff.\n\n18 Yule, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, revised by Cordier, London, Murray, 1903.\n\n19 Budge, The Monks of Kublai Khan, London, R.T.S. 1928.\n\nPage 30\n\nPage 31", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205103, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1966", "page_number": 59, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "54\n\nHERBERT FRANKE\n\npeculiarity of the Chinese script, and Chinese script is something that would strike even the most casual observer as something different from any other script in Asia or Europe. Even William Rubruk, who had never been in China but only in Mongolia, gives an entirely correct description of the Chinese writing system. All this has cast some doubt on the contention that the Polo family spent a long time in China. But however that may be, until definite proof has been adduced that the Polo book is a world description, where the chapters on China are taken from some other, perhaps Persian, source (some expressions he uses are Persian), we must give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was there after all. Polo tells us that he was \"the first Latin\" to come to Kublai Khan's court. \"Il (that is, Kublai) avait très grande joie de leur venue comme un qui n'a jamais vu aucun Latin.\" This is another statement in his book that is open to doubt. The Polos were certainly not the first Europeans who came to Kublai Khan's court. This is shown by a passage in a Chinese chronicle covering the time from the eleventh month of 1260 to the eighth month of 1261, that is, the beginnings of Kublai's reign. This chronicle is, at the same time, the most detailed annalistic source for any period of the Mongol dominion in China. There we find recorded under the seventh day of the second month of the second year of Chung-t'ung (June 6, 1261) that an embassy of the \"Fa-lang\" country came to Shang-tu (Dolon-nor) and was received in audience. Fa-lang is the Chinese rendering of Farang, the Franks, the name by which the Near Eastern peoples called Europeans. The description that these self-styled envoys gave of their country and their travels is very curious, but not more curious than some of the fantastic notions about the East that are found in European medieval literature: \"These people came and presented garments made from vegetable fabrics (cotton?) and other presents. These envoys had travelled three years from their country to Shang-tu. They reported that their country is in the Far West beyond the Uighurs. In their country there is constant daylight and no night. It is evening there when the field mice come out of their holes. If somebody dies there, then Heaven is invoked and it might even happen that the person is restored to life. Flies and mosquitoes are born from wood. The women are very beautiful and the men usually have blue eyes and blonde hair. There are two oceans on the route from", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205104, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1966", "page_number": 60, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS\n\n55\n\nthere, one which it takes one month to cross, the other one whole year. Their ships are so big that they can hold between 50 and 100 men. These people presented a wine beaker made from the egg-shell of a sea bird. If one poured wine into it the wine became warm immediately... The emperor was very pleased that these people had come from so far and gave them liberal gifts of gold and textiles.\n\nThis is quite an extraordinary story. But it is, in more than one way, typical of most descriptions of foreign countries in the Middle Ages. It is always the fanciful and fantastic that is given predominant attention, and travellers seem always to have made a point of telling yarns that they knew would impress their foreign listeners. This entire problem of cosmography in the Middle Ages, European and Chinese, cannot be understood without investigating some of the basic underlying concepts that invariably show up in descriptions of regions and peoples at the end of the world. The unknown is full of marvels, of mirabilia and portenta. But there is equally, as a rule, some factual basis for even the most fantastic notion, distorted as it is by transmission and tainted by preconceived concepts about the world. I should add here in an aside that the description of the Mongols in the European medieval Latin sources shows the gradual transition from the apocalyptic Gog and Magog concepts, derived from late Hellenistic lore, to the sober accounts of the travellers and missionaries. The Franks at Kublai Khan's court evidently tried to impress their Mongol and Chinese hosts by some tall stories. But there are certainly a few factual data that can help to elucidate this curious report. The reference to the constant daylight seems to imply that these people came from Northern Europe because of the short summer nights there. In my opinion these blonde and blue-eyed men were traders from either the Scandinavian countries or, which seems even more probable, from some Northern trading center like Novgorod. It remains a question what is meant by the two seas they had to cross. Did they reach Shang-tu by sea, that is via the Indian Ocean? Or are the two seas the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, or the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea? We do not know and perhaps never shall. The curious remark about flies and mosquitoes being born from wood reminds one strongly of the Medieval European notion, derived from Aristotle, according to which insects like flies and fleas come from wood.3\n\nPage 60\n\nPage 61", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205105, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1966", "page_number": 61, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "56\n\nHERBERT FRANKE\n\nThese Northern European traders, then, were the first Europeans that ever came to China, or so it seems. They left very little, if any, impression on the Chinese. Not even the annalistic chapters of the Yüan-shih recorded their arrival, and but for the court diary kept by a Chinese official in Kublai's residence we would never have known about them at all. The same is true for the Polos, who are, as indicated above, not recorded in any Chinese source. But this applies not only to the Venetian travellers. The many missionaries, mostly Franciscan friars, who came to China have left no traces in Chinese records and we would not know about their visit if Western sources had not preserved their accounts.\n\nGiovanni da Montecorvino, who was dispatched to the Great Khan in 1289 by Pope Nicholas IV, went to Peking (Khanbaliq) and we have in a medieval chronicle his letters dated from Khanbaliq 1305 and 1306 respectively. There he reports on the progress of his evangelistic work, on baptisms, and he asks to have sent to him an antiphonarium, a collection of legends, a psalter and a graduale. He pretends to have learned the Tatar language; that is, either Mongolian or Turkish. Otherwise nothing in his letters indicates things Chinese. They could have been written anywhere where the \"Tartar\" language was spoken and that was almost everywhere between the Black Sea and the Yellow Sea. He did not notice that the majority of the Peking inhabitants did not speak Tatar but Chinese.\n\nA similar impression is given by most of the other letters written by Franciscan friars residing in China all of which points to a singular lack of contact between China and representatives of Occidental civilization. There are, on the other hand, a few remains of an archaeological nature proving that Latin Christianity reached China after all. The most famous relic is the \"Latin Tombstone\" in Yang-chou, which has been called, not inappropriately, by the author of a study of the monument, “a landmark of Medieval Christianity in China.\" This stone was discovered in 1951 and has a Latin inscription saying that \"In the Name of the Lord Amen here lies Catherine, Daughter of the Late Sir Dominic de Viglione, who died in the Year of the Lord One Thousand Three Hundred Forty-Two in the Month of June.\"\n\nAbove the inscription there are several finely chiseled drawings of Mary with the Child and scenes of the martyrdom of St. Catherine, the patron-saint of the girl. These representations of Christian art show an impressive combination of Western motifs", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205108, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1966", "page_number": 64, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS\n\n59\n\nand that the foreign country of Fu-lang itself did not arouse any curiosity among the writers. Europe, in any case during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, remained unknown to the Chinese. It was not until the arrival of the Portuguese, and, a little later, of the Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century that the two worlds were brought into closer contact. This relative disinterest in foreign countries is paralleled 100 years earlier by the poems of Yeh-lü Ch'u-ts'ai. He had been in Khwarezmia (today Russian Turkestan) with Chingis Khan's armies and wrote a number of poems on Western subjects. If one would put it in a flippant way, one would have to say that Yeh-lü in his poems seems to have been impressed not by the proud mosques and the ancient culture of that region but mostly by the grape wine and the water melons that were grown in Khwarezmia.\n\nIf we take the word Western in a broader sense than just European and include the Near East, then we find for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries much more detailed information on \"Westerners\" and their influence on activities in China. Islamic civilization had some impact on China under the Mongols, and we have seen that certainly geography in China was flourishing, incorporating data on the non-Chinese world taken from Arab sources. The geographical interest of the Mongol court is also reflected in Kublai Khan's attempts to discover the sources of the Yellow River. Expeditions were sent and the reports that can be found in the dynastic history and also in another, private source the Cho-keng lu, printed in 1366 are a valuable source for the historical geography of the Ch'ing-hai region and Eastern Tibet. Islam had, of course, reached China much earlier, that is, under the T'ang in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D., but it was under the Mongol rulers that Muslims began to take part in Chinese life to a greater extent. The Muslim contribution to Chinese civilization under the Yüan seems to have been chiefly in the fields of science. Astronomy was highly developed in the Islamic countries. After the Mongols had conquered Iraq and Persia, not a few Muslim scholars went to China. A center for astronomy was the observatory in Maraghah (Azerbaijan) founded in or about 1258. Under the Ilkhan Hulagu or his successor a Marāghah astronomer, Jamal ad-Din, was dispatched to China with what may be called blue-prints for astronomical instruments. We find their Persian-Arabic names and a short description of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205109, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1966", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "60\n\nHERBERT FRANKE\n\ntheir functions in the Yuan-shih. On the Chinese side, the leading astronomer was Kuo Shou-ching (1231-1316). To him fell the difficult task of reconciling the Arab astronomical system with traditional Chinese astronomy which had entirely different mathematical and geometrical foundations. As I am not a specialist in the history of science, I have to refer to Needham's detailed study of this problem.7\n\nAnother field where Western Asians reached some prominence in China was medicine. It seems as if the skill of Westerners in surgery greatly impressed the Chinese, because physicians from the Near East who performed all sorts of difficult operations are frequently mentioned. Some of them were not Muslim but Nestorian Christians, like Ai-hsieh (1227-1308) whose Chinese name is a rendering of Syriac Isa, Yehoshua, or Jesus. He was not only a famous physician but also for some time served as a Court Astronomer under Kublai Khan prior to the arrival of Jamal ad-Din. Ai-hsieh reached high offices at Kublai's court and was even honored posthumously by having his biography included in the Yüan dynastic history. His activities in China, however, and the presence of many other doctors from the Western Regions, failed to leave a permanent impact on Chinese medicine. The theoretical framework of traditional Chinese medicine continued to be the basis for medical literature and there is not much trace of Western contacts to be noticed in such medical and pharmacological Chinese works as the Pen-ts'ao kang-mu by Li Shih-chen (sixteenth century). On the other hand Chinese medicine was made known rather widely in Islamic countries, as we shall see later. It seems, in any case, that individual skills and techniques were appreciated in Yüan China rather than new theoretical issues and ideas that were entirely foreign to the Chinese. This is certainly the case in both astronomy and medicine; both remained faithful to the inherited theories in spite of occasional borrowings from the West.\n\nTechnology was another field where Westerners were active in China. We have mentioned artillery already. The catapults used by the Mongol and Northern Chinese armies against the fortified town of Hsiang-yang on the Han River were built by Mohammedan engineers. Hsiang-yang has, during a long period in Chinese history, been a town of great strategic importance. Whoever commanded Hsiang-yang could block the access to the fertile Middle", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205267, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1967", "page_number": 29, "title": "RAS-1967", "content_text": "22\n\nJEN YU-WEN\n\nolder than Hsien and Ping, was also reared by Young, being the younger sister of Shih. Hsien, the 2nd son, by virtue of being the offspring of the Queen, was regarded as the legitimate heir to the throne according to Chinese tradition. After being crowned, the boy emperor named his new reign Tê Yu () beginning with the next year (1275).\n\nIn the first year of Tê Yu (1275), the Mongol army under the premier Pê Yen (16) invaded South China and after many victories marched toward the capital Lin-an in the winter. The imperial court was alarmed and evacuated the Emperor's two brothers and sister under the care of mother Young and their uncles.3 Before departure, the two princes received new titles: I Wang (1) and Kuang Wang (1), respectively. Early in 1276 the royal party left Lin-an in a hurry heading for the south. It was the beginning of an itinerary of constant flight which would last for three full years.\n\nShortly afterwards, Emperor Hsien and the Queen Mother Ch'uan surrendered to the Mongols who subsequently took them to Peking. The Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan gave the dethroned Sung Emperor the new title of Duke of Ying Kuo (). Years later he was forced to become a Buddhist monk, was banished to Mongolia and died in exile there. It was said that his own son, who had been adopted by a Mongolian prince, would eventually become the last emperor of the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty. The Ex-Queen Mother Ch'uan became a Buddhist nun and died of old age.4\n\nWhen the capital Lin-an fell, the royal evacuees arrived at Wuchow (##), Chekiang. They continued their flight toward the south. They had to travel on foot for seven days and the two young princes were carried by their uncles on their backs all the way throughout the rough journey. After reaching Wenchow (), a city near the seashore, they stayed for about three months trying to rally loyal supporters there. A few did come, such as a high official Lu Hsiu-fu (✯✯✯) and generals Chang Shih-chieh (*) and Su Liu-i (***) each bringing soldiers along. An army of considerable size was mustered. The Premier Ch'en I-chung (1), who had deserted the court after the Mongols entered Lin-an, also reported his presence at Wenchow, which was his native city. In view of the grave situation created by the capture of the young emperor, which thus", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214952, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2000", "page_number": 48, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "had become a mere staple drink. May be so, but no one would doubt its importance to the Chinese people. 'The cup that cheers but not inebriates' as the Chinese describe it, remains one of the pillars of Chinese social customs.\n\nTea and the British\n\nThe British people's love of tea is proverbial, but it came late, centuries after its pleasures were known to the Chinese. Who introduced tea to the western world? Thoughts naturally turn to Marco Polo. But the Venetian traveller, who wrote vividly and at times with exaggeration of the many marvels of Cathay, did not mention tea; perhaps it was not a favourite drink in the court of Kublai Khan. Instead, credit is sometimes given to another Venetian called Ramusio who in the 16th century wrote enthusiastically about tea. However, this lies in the realms of conjecture. Historically, it is the Dutch who are credited with introducing tea to Europe, around 1610 AD. Europe was slow to respond. Opinions swayed as to its merits or demerits. Within the next hundred years, Europe accepted tea as its best loved beverage, and while it has remained popular in Holland and the rest of Europe, it had never reached the level of popularity it enjoyed in Britain.\n\nStories abound as to when Britain took to tea, but all are agreed that 1660 was a milestone - when Samuel Pepys, that inveterate diarist and Admiralty official, took his first cup of tea and so noted in his diary. It had infiltrated into Britain slowly. First drunk in tea houses, then favoured by the Court, by the beginning of the 18th century, tea had found its way into the home and to the daily table of the common man. It seemed to permeate every aspect of British life. It became a panacea for a multitude of ills and support in difficult times. Confronted by an emergency, tea was the immediate remedy. The Army made its own particular brand of strong sweet tea. 'Let's have a brew' was a great encouraging cry during a lull in fighting. Some would go as far as to assert that it helped the people of Britain to endure the blitz during the Second World War.\n\nBy the end of the 18th century, the rise in tea consumption in Britain was phenomenal. To the British people tea had come to be almost a necessity of life. Afternoon tea had become a treasured custom in every British household, and a whole ritual had evolved as to how to prepare", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 } ]